Land open to oil and gas drilling by during Presidents Bush (left), Obama (center), and proposed by Trump (right)

Where Coastal States Stand on Offshore Drilling

Orange: Opposes, Blue: Governor is in Favor, Tan: Undecided

At the End of the George W. Bush Administration

Blue: Open to Oil and Gas Drilling, Yellow: Not Yet Open, Orange: Under Protection

At the End of the Obama Administration 

Blue: Open to Oil and Gas Drilling, Yellow: Not Yet Open, Orange: Under Protection

Trumps Proposal

Blue: Open to Oil and Gas Drilling, Orange: Under Protection

Where Is America’s Offshore Oil?

Economically Recoverable Oil and Gas

nytimes

Turnover In Trump's White House Is 'Record-Setting'

"While some turnover is expected and possibly beneficial, excessive turnover portends problems," writes Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "[President Trump] has valued loyalty over qualifications and suffered from a White House that has functioned in a chaotic manner. Both features have made it difficult to retain staff and have contributed to the governance difficulties he has encountered."

npr

US unemployment rate

ribeira grande, sao miguel, azores, portugal

Cha Gorreana (Gorreana tea plantation)

lisbon

sheetcaking

America's most misspelled words

google time lapse videos

earth's history on a football field

Obama Names LGBT Landmark As National Monument

President Obama is designating a new national monument around the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.

The Stonewall National Monument in New York City will be the first addition to the National Park System specifically highlighting the history of the LGBT community.

The monument covers nearly 8 acres in New York's Greenwich Village including a landmark gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. In June of 1969, patrons at the bar fought back against police persecution — an event that's widely seen as a watershed in the campaign for LGBT rights.

"Raids like these were nothing new, but this time the patrons had had enough," Obama said in a White House video announcing the new monument. "So they stood up and spoke out. The riots became protests. The protests became a movement. The movement ultimately became an integral part of America." npr

NYTimes Nuclear Winter RetroReport

Fact-Check: Bernie Sanders and Detroit

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton will face off in the Michigan primary on Tuesday, at a time when the state's major cities have seen better days. Flint faces a lead-tainted-water crisis, while Detroit is still reeling from its bankruptcy.

Sanders attacked Clinton on Twitter this week, connecting Clinton's support for free trade, specifically the North American Free Trade Agreement signed into law by her husband, to the kind of blight Detroit and other cities in the Upper Midwest are seeing.

But is it that simple? We decided to try and find out.

On Thursday, Sanders tweeted, "The people of Detroit know the real cost of Hillary Clinton's free trade policies," along with five photos of dilapidated buildings. Shortly after that initial tweet, he added: "43,000 Michiganders lost their jobs due to NAFTA. I opposed that bad deal, @HillaryClinton did not."

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The Big Question:

There's a lot going on here, so we're going to break this into two parts:

1. What does free trade (and especially NAFTA) have to do with the devastation Sanders' tweet depicted?

2. How big of a proponent of NAFTA was Hillary Clinton?

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The Short Answers:

1. Probably not much (though it did cost some people their jobs), and

2. She supported it, though she expressed reservations sometimes. (Either way, importantly, it was signed under her husband's administration.)

---

The Long Answers:

Let's do this point by point:

1. What does free trade have to do with the devastation Sanders tweeted about?

Detroit's blight makes for striking photos, but its causes go well beyond trade policy.

"I'm pretty sure the buildings he posted were abandoned before 1993 [when NAFTA was signed]," said James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Policy Institute, a Michigan-based economic policy think tank that describes itself as "free market"-oriented.

graph

White flight: Clearly, Detroit had plenty of problems (and abandoned buildings) outside of trade agreements. And those problems started well before, for example NAFTA or the decision to normalize trade relations with China in 2000. In the 1950s and 1960s, and particularly after the 1967 race riots, Detroit was the poster child of "white flight," as hundreds of thousands of white Detroiters fled to the suburbs.

Since then, other factors have contributed to Detroit's decline:

Auto industry problems: Threatened by strikes, some factories started to leave the city — and no other industry could fill the gap left by those factories, as the New York Times reported in 2013. Foreign competition also contributed to the decline in employment, and many argue that automation also has hurt manufacturing.

Mismanagement: Many also point the finger at a series of Detroit's mayors for problems ranging from bad fiscal decisions to outright corruption.

All of this made for a vicious cycle. A diminished population left a weaker economy and also less government revenue, which meant fewer government services, which meant a lower quality of life, which helped send more people packing.

Even in the last few years, the population continued to plummet — the Census Bureau reported in 2011 that the Motor City's population fell by a stunning 25 percent between 2000 and 2010.

"That's really not going to be NAFTA," Hohman said. "That's basic corruption and mismanagement of the city government that has made it unable to provide the basic services."

Also, there's the question of what Sanders means by "Hillary Clinton's free trade policies." It's true that she voted for some trade pacts as a senator and that she once was an advocate for TPP (more on that later), but as for NAFTA, that was signed under her husband's administration. She did promote it at one point (more on that later, too), as Sanders says, but that in particular isn't her policy.

OK. So if free trade policies like NAFTA didn't drive Detroit's decline, that doesn't mean it didn't affect the city's (or the state of Michigan's) economy. Sanders' 43,000 figure comes from a 2011 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning policy think tank that has produced several reports about the potential detrimental effects of trade pacts like NAFTA and TPP.

Specifically, that 43,000 number refers to the number of jobs "displaced due to trade deficits with Mexico" — and, in terms of percent change, EPI ranks Michigan as the hardest hit. Altogether, that report said the U.S. lost more than 680,000 jobs, as of 2010, to Mexico, thanks to NAFTA.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration had argued that the pact would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. And that argument for NAFTA continues to this day. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year said that NAFTA "supports" millions of jobs. The idea is that opening up the U.S. to that many new markets (and new customers) sparks more economic activity.

So two different sides disagree on the direction of the employment effects of trade policy — but then, some economists believe that trade pacts simply don't bring about any major changes in the long run.

"Most analysts would agree that, and we certainly agree that, jobs were lost. It's true that jobs are lost," said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

He added that the auto industry was one of the hardest hit by NAFTA, as some production was shifted to Mexico. However, Hufbauer contended the net number of jobs created by a trade agreement usually balances that out.

"Any trade agreement is basically a job churn agreement," he said. "Jobs are lost, and jobs are gained, and on balance it's about zero in terms of number of jobs." (Read more about this dynamic in a fact check on TPP job gains from the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler.)

As one 2004 Congressional Research Service study — itself a review of other studies — found, NAFTA had "little or no impact on aggregate employment" during its then-10-year existence.

Hufbauer added that he believes, on balance, that the gains from trade are positive, leading to lower prices on consumer goods and higher-wage jobs. Of course, if that's true, that still stings for the workers who loses her job at, say, a Michigan auto plant, if she isn't qualified for or can't reach the job that replaces hers.

And not everyone buys this idea. Robert Scott, who wrote the EPI report, argued that while the net-zero effect might be true in theory, it's not true in practice. He believes that, thanks to a number of factors including what economists call secular stagnation, the U.S. isn't producing those replacement jobs. And those jobs that NAFTA did create he believes tend to be lower-wage than the ones it sent elsewhere.

So NAFTA meant that some people lost their jobs as factories moved South of the border, while other jobs were created.

And it's true that employment has fallen in Michigan's manufacturing sector since the agreement was signed (though the major decline began years after NAFTA took effect).

But knowing exactly how many of those job losses (or gains in other sectors or other places) to attribute NAFTA is virtually impossible, as NPR's Don Gonyea put it in 2013, as the causes are complicated and interwoven.

Regardless of how trade affected the local economy, tying Detroit's problems to more open trade is far oversimplifying what's going on. "Detroit and Flint are suffering, largely from self-inflicted, in some cases state-inflicted, wounds," said Hohman.

2. Did Hillary Clinton support NAFTA?

Yes, though she often expressed reservations.

"I think NAFTA is proving its worth," she said in 1996.

And she told an audience at Davos in 1998, "I hope that American business voices will be heard" in promoting fast-track authority, a policy under which Congress can give trade pacts an up-or-down vote only.

However, she added that there needed to be "sensitivity to worker and environmental concerns."

In her book Living History, she characterized NAFTA as an "important administration goal" for her husband's presidency and praised the pact's potential to create jobs, despite the fact that it was "unpopular with labor unions." But over the years, she offered measured critiques. In 2000, she had called the agreement "flawed," and, in 2004, she said that while the agreement was "on balance" good for the U.S., it could have been negotiated better.

Later, when running for president, she was more explicitly critical of the agreement. "NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would," she said in a 2007 CNN presidential primary debate.

Clinton's record doesn't show her to be fully in favor of or opposed to all instances of trade liberalization. While she voted for several deals as a New York senator, she also voted against the 2005 Central American Free Trade Agreement.

"Some people are generally pro-trade or anti-trade. She's case-by-case on trade," as Gene Sperling, chairman of the National Economic Council under both Presidents Clinton and Obama, told the Washington Post in 2015.

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The Broader Context

This doesn't just matter because the Michigan primary is coming up. And it's not that Sanders is unnecessarily fixated on a 23-year-old trade deal. Rather, this is all part of a bigger fight over the Trans Pacific Partnership, the massive trade deal that the U.S. has been negotiating with Asia.

On TPP, President Obama has found himself in the unusual position of agreeing with many Republicans and the business community on TPP while alienating farther-left lawmakers, with Sanders among the most vocal critics of the deal.

As secretary of state, Clinton most famously supported the TPP when she, in 2012, told an audience that it "sets the gold standard" for trade agreements. (CNN later counted 45 instances in which she praised the deal.) And this has been one of the areas on which Sanders has been able to contrast himself most with Clinton — and therefore hit her hard. Many labor unions are strongly opposed to the trade deal as well, meaning hitting Clinton on TPP could threaten her support.

But on the campaign trail in 2015, she expressed doubts about the deal. And then in October, she made her position clear, telling PBS NewsHour's Judy Woodruff that the deal didn't meet the "high bar" she said she had set for it.

Not that Sanders is about to let this go. As Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver said on Thursday, "Election-year conversions won't bring back American jobs."

The Stuff We've Left In Space

In 1957, humans launched a satellite into orbit, Sputnik-1.

The same mission also created our first piece of space junk: the rocket body that took Sputnik into space.

By the year 2000, there were hundreds of satellites in orbit — and thousands of pieces of space junk, including leftover rockets and pieces of debris.

And today? According to the Royal Institution in London, there are about 20,000 pieces of tracked space debris, ranging from larger than an apple to as big as a school bus. (There are far more objects smaller than that, including millions of pieces of debris too tiny to track, according to NASA.)

Stuart Grey of University College London created a visualization showing how those larger pieces of junk proliferated over time — and how single events, like a Chinese test launch in 2007 or the collision of two satellites in 2009, could create thousands of pieces of space trash.

You can see a short preview above, or try out the interactive version on the Royal Institution's website. npr

The Mississippi Swim

On December 29th, 1930, Fred Newton emerged from the water in New Orleans, Louisiana after completing a swim down the length of the Mississippi River. Newton's journey had begun five months earlier when he dove into the river at the Ford Dam in Minnesota. He swam 1,826 miles in 742 hours. To combat water temperatures that fell to 47° F, Fred lubed up in axel grease and petroleum jelly. When he emerged in New Orleans he had set the world record at the time for the longest swim by anyone who is not a fish.

Our Parasites And Vermin Reveal Secrets Of Human History

They look like tiny tubes with stumpy legs. They can nestle snugly into pores, right at the base of small hairs. And there are probably hundreds on your face.

The harmless mite Demodex folliculorum, seen here in an electron microscope image, lives in the follicles of eyelashes.

We're taking about Demodex folliculorum, the mite that calls your hair follicles home. "Probably if you've ever gotten a gross gunky plug out of a nose pore, that's what it looks like," says Michelle Trautwein, an evolutionary biologist at the California Academy of Sciences. "When you get to know them, they're actually pretty adorable."

Trautwein and her colleagues have peeled the mites off microscope slides that they super-glued to their faces. They've scraped the little guys off people's foreheads with the curved end of a bobby pin. They've even ferreted out the insects' DNA from tiny spatulas of face grease." They've probably been with us since the origin of our species," she says.

And Trautwein thinks the mites could help answer questions about human migrations through history, perhaps more than genetics or archaeology could alone because of how they're shared among humans.

The mites are the latest in a not-so-regal lineage of parasites and vermin that could help pin down how human ancestors behaved and moved across the continents. When archaeological evidence is scant or human genetic data is too messy, sometimes these millennia-old frenemies — from rats to tapeworms — are the next best option.

"You don't share them with strangers when you give them a hug hello," she says of the mites. They're mostly shared between sexual partners and members of the same nuclear family. Because of that tight bond, the mites can be a pretty good measure of where people came from.

In an exploratory study published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers collected mites from the faces of about 70 people with different origins, most of them living in the U.S., and sequenced the mites' mitochondrial DNA. They found that people from different continents harbor different varieties of mites on their faces. Even generations after a family leaves one geographic region for another, Trautwein and her colleagues found, their descendants can retain those original mite populations. Think of them as family heirlooms.

"Basically, as all humans evolved in Africa our mites evolved with us," says Trautwein. "And as populations became isolated they evolved into their own lineages, just like humans did."

"They are potentially gross and they do infect us and take things from us, but to understand ourselves, it's a really great potential tool to use," says George Perry, an anthropologist and biologist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved with the study. "It's an amazing, largely untapped area to learn about our own history."

Perry's group is researching how tapeworms, which live in the intestines of mammals, could help show when hominins — human ancestors and their relatives — started consistently eating meat. The archaeological evidence is pretty meager — just a few scratched up animal bones from a couple of million years ago. It's assumed that human ancestors first got tapeworms when they domesticated pigs and cows sometime in the last 12,000 years and started routinely eating undercooked meat, which is how the worms would transfer over.

But, he says, the three species of tapeworm that currently inhabit humans are actually most similar to those of lions and hyenas. Perry says the similarity suggests that hominins picked them up long before the domestication of herbivores, when they were consistently chowing down on the same animals as lions and hyenas. He's now studying tapeworm adaptations to heat stress to see if it yields hints about when humans started cooking meat.

Rodents also have been useful tools in piecing together human travel routes. Rats helped corroborate the hypothesis that indigenous Taiwanese people first colonized Polynesia about 3,000 years ago. There isn't much evidence left of the first generations of people to colonize New Zealand, but there is archaeological evidence of a rat population that arrived on the island and was well established by about 700 years ago. That suggests that humans brought them there on their boats.

Lice might take the cake when it comes to vermin that have revealed the most snippets of human history. Scientists have used louse DNA to determine when human ancestors lost their fur and started wearing clothes. Human ancestors picked up pubic lice from gorilla ancestors some 4 million years ago, meaning that by that point the islands of head hair and pubic hair were far enough apart to provide two different environments for their parasite guests. This change suggests to anthropologists that our modern way of regulating body temperature may have come about early in our evolutionary history. (It also suggests some unexpected cavorting between gorilla and human ancestors.)

DNA analysis showed that body lice diverged genetically from head lice somewhere between 30,000 and 114,000 years ago, giving archaeologists a minimum date for when people first started wearing clothes. Before clothes, there wouldn't have been an environment separate enough for a group of lice to inhabit and evolve separately from the ones on people's heads.

"We're really just a habitat for all sorts of natural life," says Trautwein. "People think that evolution and wildlife are these remote things, but it's happening all over us."

If it weren't, pieces of deep human history might still be hidden. npr

Fact Check: Did Obama Withdraw From Iraq Too Soon, Allowing ISIS To Grow?

Like everyone else, the Republican candidates talk about ISIS a lot. And what they — at least Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — charge is that ISIS is President Obama's fault, because he withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011 — when he should have kept them there to keep a lid on the insurgency.

Let's Break It Down:

The Claim:

"Barack Obama became president, and he abandoned Iraq. He left, and when he left al Qaida was done for. ISIS was created because of the void that we left, and that void now exists as a caliphate the size of Indiana." — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush

The Big Question:

OK, maybe it's actually two questions:

1. Is Obama responsible for the timing of the troop withdrawal from Iraq?

1. Did that withdrawal cause the rise of ISIS?

And there are answers for both, though not simple ones.

The Long Answer:

First, we have to decide on a starting point.

Many Democrats, and even a few Republicans, say we should look back to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. That, and the dismantling of the entire security force, created an angry, mainly Sunni demographic, which fueled the insurgency that would later become ISIS.

Others go back further, pointing out the strong links between Saddam Hussein's brutal Baathist regime, and the structure, methods and, indeed, commanders of ISIS.

But if we take the invasion as a given, and Saddam Hussein as history, we can begin the answer to the first question —

Was Obama responsible for the timing of the withdrawal?

It was President George W. Bush who signed the Status of Forces agreement in 2008, which planned for all American troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

"The agreement lays out a framework for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq — a withdrawal that is possible because of the success of the surge," he said in a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki at the time.

Moments later, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the president. It is important to remember most Iraqis saw the Americans as occupiers and blame them for civilian deaths.

Maliki summed up the sentiment at the time, thus:

"The incomplete sovereignty and the presence of foreign troops are the most dangerous, most complicated and most burdensome legacy we have faced since the time of dictatorship. Iraq should get rid of them to protect its young democratic experiment."

Thousands of American troops had died, and by the time Obama announced the withdrawal, fully three-quarters of Americans supported the withdrawal (though a majority of Republicans did not).

Still, many had real concerns al Qaeda wasn't done for. And there were some, including U.S. senators, saying the troops should stay just in case things went downhill. They say Obama should have sold the idea, hard, to Maliki.

Iraq analyst Kirk Sowell said Obama never really tried.

"This is one of the criticisms of Obama — that he sort of wanted the negotiations to fail," Sowell said, "and, so, he didn't even talk to Maliki until it was basically all over."

The State Department's lawyers said troops couldn't stay in Iraq unless the Iraqi parliament authorized them to do so, including granting them immunity from Iraqi law. The Iraqi parliamentarians would never OK such a decision, with Iraqi popular opinion staunchly against U.S. troops staying.

Sowell saw State's decision as a deliberately insurmountable obstacle.

"It was a barrier that was very high," he said, "and there was no way it was going to be jumped over."

But, does Obama bear responsibility for the timing of the troop withdrawal? On balance, no.

He was following through on an agreement made by Bush and abiding by the will of the Iraqi and American people.

Alright so, onto the next question —

Did the withdrawal of troops lead to the rise of ISIS?

Back then, in 2011, there was no ISIS. The group didn't exist under that name yet. There was just their predecessor, al Qaeda in Iraq, which had been at the forefront of the terrible insurgency in Iraq. But many thought it was licked.

"All of the intelligence that we had gathered, all of the results of the surge, all of the detainees we had in our detention system, all of the information we had coming to us from people on the ground, from the tribes indicated that al Qaeda in Iraq was defeated," said Ret. Col. Peter Mansoor, who served in Iraq.

That surge was the influx of American soldiers, and the way the U.S. military organized Sunni tribes to fight against insurgents. The Americans paid them, helped arm them and gave them air cover.

One of those tribal leaders, Sheikh Hamid Taees, told me: "In May of 2006, I worked closely with the American side to rid Anbar of terrorism and al Qaeda, and actually we killed a large number of al Qaeda fighters."

But by the time of that comment, early in 2014, al Qaeda was beginning to get a grip on Sunni areas again, including that province of Anbar.

Many Sunni sheikhs say once the American soldiers left, the minority Sunni population of Iraq suffered under a government dominated by the Shiite majority. That government stopped paying most of them, and even arrested many.

(As an aside, we should note that there was a political, as well as a military, dimension to American influence in Iraq: Obama continued to support the government even as Sunni fear and anger grew. "We were encouraged," he said in 2013, "by the work that Prime Minister Maliki has done in the past to ensure that all people inside of Iraq — Sunni, Shia and Kurd — feel that they have a voice in their government."

(But they did not feel that. Sheikh Zeidan al-Jabri led a series of Sunni protests and sit-ins in Anbar, which were eventually violently dispersed by security forces at the end of 2013.

("For a year, we did not attack anyone; we were an example of democracy on an international level," he told me from exile in Jordan. "And what did the world do? The world simply turned its face from us and gave Maliki the permission to attack the demonstrations and kill hundreds of innocent demonstrators.")

So some Sunnis were drawn back to the insurgency. ISIS found supporters and gained ground. And, yes, much of that could have been prevented by a big U.S. troop presence.

The other thing that happened after the American military left was that the Iraqi army deteriorated dramatically.

"They really did become relatively complacent, and then flat out just didn't train," said Major-General Paul E. Funk II, speaking after abruptly returning to Iraq on a training mission 2014. "Just didn't spend the money to do it, didn't maintain the systems and therein lies the problem."

And corruption was running rampant. Supplies were stolen; soldiers were paid, who never reported for duty. And, so, when ISIS came rushing into the city of Mosul last year, the military collapsed.

I met one of the defeated Iraqi troops, named Bahr Ibrahim, shortly afterward, sitting dejectedly next to an injured friend in a hospital not far from Mosul.

"We fought," he said. But ISIS had more men and bigger weapons.

So, yes, the withdrawal of U.S. troops helped ISIS. If they'd stayed, they could have bolstered Iraq's security forces and tamped down Sunni anger.

But the Republicans' claim that ISIS grew because Obama withdrew troops from Iraq still glosses over many other factors beyond America's control — like the fact that the rift between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq has been going on for centuries. And that wasn't going to be permanently solved by American troops.

Another crucial thing is Syria. For reasons completely beyond Obama's control, after 2011, Syria sank into civil war. Suddenly, just over Iraq's borders were vast ungoverned spaces and lots of weapons. It became a safe haven for ISIS to grow in.

The Republican candidates have the benefit of hindsight now, but they couldn't have predicted all the things that contributed to the growth of ISIS back then. And neither could Obama.

The Short Answer:

1. No, Obama shouldn't shoulder the full burden for the timing of the withdrawal of troops;

2. Yes, a significant American troop presence would have helped slow the growth of ISIS

But with the significant caveat that there were many other factors that enabled ISIS to become strong — and they weren't all predictable in 2011. npr

This story is part of NPR's fact-checking series, "Break It Down," in which we try to cut through the spin and put things in context. Have something you want us to fact check? Put it in the comments section or send us an email at nprpolitics@npr.org.